


Facsimile

by Dr_Madwoman



Series: Two Shadows [1]
Category: Carmilla - J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Dracula - Bram Stoker, Nadja (1994)
Genre: "Her complexion is so wonderfully ROSY I don't understand how you could say no!", "She's an idiot Carmilla do you want to eat idiot for the next year?", (she's trying Really Hard), Adoption, Babies, Blood, Carmilla is a lowkey deadbeat mom but she feeds Nadja high quality lumberjacks to make up for it, Domestic Fluff, Dracula's Wives/Nadja's Judgemental Stepmothers, Dracula's shitty parenting, Edgar shows up periodically to pick fights with Carmilla, F/F, I have no idea how to represent non-English dialogue I'm sorry, Immortality, Minor Character Death, Motherhood, Nadja and Carmilla squabble over the aesthetic values of potential slaves, Nadja goes from Deep Angst to Doting Mother in under 60 seconds, Nadja is a Hardcore Helicopter Mother, Nadja is either really great at being a human or really terrible, Nadja is skittish about psychic contact, Nadja's B+ parenting, Psychic Bond, and she could not keep Edgar out even if she wanted to, but she has left a small door at the back for Carmilla, he feels she is a Bad Influence on his twin, her mind has walls around it miles high, human thralls as furnishings, rural peasant girls as food staple
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-20
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-08 03:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10376520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Madwoman/pseuds/Dr_Madwoman
Summary: Nadja finds a baby in the wilds and absconds with it.





	

Nadja only wanted to see Mircalla happy. The countess was the bedrock of her world, and Nadja was very young yet, prone to passions. If Mircalla had asked for the moon to wear in her hair, Nadja would have found the means to tear down the skies; in her mind there was no consequence too terrible if it made Mircalla smile.

Nadja was very young, and thought that this was the way to love.

* * *

Even when they were not hunting, Nadja and Mircalla watched the humans who lived within their territory. They moved at the edges of the bigger villages, quiet and curious as the humans teemed. They each had their favorite distractions among the populations, certain humans they looked in on, or certain types of humans they found themselves drawn to time and again.

Nadja fixated on young couples, so newly married that no cradle had been filled. She would follow the brides on market days, barely able to keep her eyes open in the sunlight but loathe to miss a single detail. They always seemed to be smiling, those women. It bewildered Nadja, to see wives who were happy in their husbands, who ran to greet them and opened their legs to them willingly.

Mircalla had laughed the first time Nadja had expressed her confusion, and asked if she had never seen a happy marriage before.

_No._

The answer had made Mircalla angry, and she had wound her arms around Nadja and rested her forehead to hers. Holding her fast, Mircalla kissed her until she trembled and vowed to show her how a marriage ought to be.

Mircalla did not much care for newlyweds. She much preferred children.

Nadja assumed initially that Mircalla liked human young because they provided easy access to the homes of their mothers, but it went beyond that. Something in her love’s face would soften when she watched the young ones playing, her eyes far-off and troubled. Nadja wondered over it, this melancholy in the face of childish games, until a terrible thought occurred to her.

It took Nadja a full month to work up the fortitude to sit beside Mircalla and ask, as gently as she could, if Mircalla had lost a child in her life before.

_One cannot lose what one never had_ , Mircalla said. She turned from Nadja and drew her hair forward over her shoulders so her face was obscured. Nadja took her hand, laced her fingers through Mircalla’s, and rested her chin on her shoulder.

She asked, as gently as before, if Mircalla wanted children.

_No,_ she said _. And yes._

Mircalla explained, then, that she had not yet been married when her dam had made her. There had been no husband, and thus no chance of children. Mircalla loved Nadja very deeply, loved what they had fashioned together in their sheltered forest home, but she could not deny that it would have been pleasant, to have had the choice.

_So many choices were taken from me. I suppose this is the least of them._

There were tears on Mircalla’s face, gleaming like broken glass in the firelight, and in that moment Najda was lost.

Her love would have a child.

* * *

 

Nadja slipped out of the schloss at nightfall, pulling her hood low over her face and taking the footpath from the kitchen gardens. Overhead, the stars were not yet bright, and she wended her way down the mountainside in the kindly darkness.

She thought as she walked, head tilted pensively to the side, trusting her feet to their work. She knew this mountain, every rock and ravine of it, every rook and rabbit. Struck blind, she would still be able to find her way home to Mircalla.

Nadja hoped, in time, that she would not have to return home empty-handed. They had discussed children, she and Mircalla, and had decided that there was time enough for the rearing of a baby. There just remained the question of how to procure one.

It might be possible, Nadja thought, to persuade a young local couple to part with one of their children. There always seemed to be at least one peasant family in every village overburdened with babies, underfoot and underfed. The humans would perhaps even be glad to give up the extra mouth, if the prospective parents were wealthy enough.

Nadja felt that her plan was less repellant than Mircalla’s idea to breed the most attractive of their human thralls together, in any case. She was not certain what an infant conceived under such enchantment would be like, did not even wish to dwell on it.

A distant sound made Nadja pause, emerging from her planning to find that she had wandered farther down the steep slope of the mountain than she had anticipated. Far off in the deepening night there came the sound; Nadja cocked her head, listening closely. Again it came, a high, steady cry in the dark, like a bird.

Nadja turned northward and followed that lonely sound, head up and thrust forward, eyes scanning the trees. She moved quickly, swift and silent as the hawk’s shadow. In time she found herself faced with a collection of hovels in a clearing; she skirted this rude village, passing within a stone’s throw of the outermost house and plunging back into the tangle undergrowth of the forest.

The crying was growing louder, and the shrillness of it set Nadja’s teeth on edge. She pressed forward, lifting the hem of her cloak out of the reach of thorns. There was a scent of blood here, hanging languidly in the air, and Nadja shivered despite herself.

She found the crier out of sight of the village, quickly bundled and thrust into the gnarled roots of an oak. A child.

Nadja approached the tree and stared down at the crabbed little creature, perturbed by its goblin features. The child howled again, and the contortions of its face made Nadja wonder, for a moment, if she and Edgar had come from their mother in such hideousness.

She knelt down on the springing moss of the forest floor and peered down at her find, gently prodding at it and peeling back its crude swaddling. The infant fussed as Nadja examined it, and she quickly found that it was in fact a she.

The girl-child was quite new, that much Nadja could tell; not more than a few hours old, with the stump of the life-cord lank on her stomach and the red, offal smell of the womb still thick on her. It seemed as though she had been exposed immediately after birth, wrapped in whatever rags were at hand and left for the wolves. The father’s scent was still rank about the tree, and Nadja bared her teeth in the moonlight.

He had thrown the child away.

Without realizing it, Nadja reached a decision.

She slid her heavy cloak from her shoulders and spread it beside the child. She lifted the girl, alarmed by the way her misshapen little head lolled on her neck, and quickly bundled her as best she could. Nadja had observed enough of human children to know the leave the red face exposed to the air and to tuck the wrinkled feet safely away, and she supposed that would have to do for now.

_Come, little one._

Nadja gathered the baby into her arms, taking care to support her head in the crook of her elbow. The baby whimpered, her earlier outrage gone, and she stared up into Nadja’s face with the blind eyes of the newly born. She seemed bewildered by this new being’s appearance into her life, but already she was turning her body towards Nadja’s, burrowing into the cloak like a vole.

It waked strange feelings in Nadja—part satisfaction, part sudden panic—and she stood for a long time under the trees, adjusting to the new weight in her arms. She wondered if she ought to feel more frightened. Surely her mother had been frightened, before she and Edgar had come.

Nadja looked down into the child’s face and decided she would save her fear for another time.

She turned from the oak and started back toward home, shifting her burden from time to time to accommodate the baby’s wriggling. Nadja was going to have to find a nurse for her, though she supposed goat milk would do for tonight. A cradle, too, and some bedding. Nadja had very little experience with toys of any sort, but had seen human children dandling dolls or tossing balls—perhaps this child would like a few of those as well.

She glanced down at the child again—she could not seem to stop herself—and found the girl sleepily sucking on a fold of her cloak, her eyelids drooping. The sight made Nadja’s eyes sting, and her throat grew unbearably tight.

Had she ever been this small? Had she ever trusted anyone so completely?

Nadja walked on, stopping periodically to listen close for the child’s heartbeat. She was asleep now, limp and soft in the crook of Nadja’s arm, and somehow that was more distressing than the crying from before. How was it humanity survived, if their young were so helpless?

_Beloved?_

Mircalla touched the back of Nadja’s mind very gently, as she always did, and wondered what Nadja had gotten up to without her. Nadja began to smile for the first time in a moon.

_Look._

She fixed her gaze on the child, opening the way in her mind for Mircalla to look through her eyes; her temples throbbed and her vision blurred as Mircalla borrowed her sight, but it was worth it to experience the flood of excitement her love felt in that moment.

_Make ready for us, we are coming home._

Mircalla promised a fire and clean blankets on Nadja’s return, and enveloped Nadja’s mind with such a feeling of love that her knees shook and her skin tingled.

When Nadja finally arrived at the gates of their castle, Mircalla was waiting in the courtyard. Nadja’s face hurt for smiling, and she laughed when Mircalla ran to her and swept her and the child up. In moments like these, when Mircalla had arms around Nadja and her chin on the crown of Nadja’s head, she did not mind being the smaller of their pair.

_Show it to me, show me the child!_

Mircalla stared in fascination when Nadja presented the baby to her, tilting her head first one way and then the other as she traced the curve of the child’s brow with one finger. She accepted the bundle from Nadja, holding the tiny body with far more confidence than Nadja had; the sight of her beloved at last holding the child she had longed for was nearly enough to make Nadja weep.

_We’ve a daughter, my love._

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sort of in the same universe as my last Nadja/Carmilla fic; the last one depressed me so badly that I needed to wedge domestic fluff into the continuum to recover lol. 
> 
> I am sorely tempted to include Dracula's Wives, who periodically show up to interfere in Nadja's unlife and tease her about Mircalla and the fact that she still sweeps around indoors with her cloak just like she did as an adolescent. Nadja holes up in a forgotten turret and stares balefully out at the horizon while meditating on the fact that she should have killed them all when she had the chance.


End file.
